Adoption cases can often be messy, especially if one parent chances his or her mind about the adoption after the child has already been given over to his or her adoptive parents. These battles can often be heart wrenching for both sets of parents as they watch their child suspended between two different families. Recently, one complicated adoption case has made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where judges are evaluating the situation to determine whether a father who has never met his little girl should have custody of her or whether a family from South Carolina who intended to adopt the child should be allowed to keep her.

The case that has made it to the Supreme Court particularly concerns at federal Native American act known as the Indian Child Welfare Act or ICWA. This is a 1978 law that was enacted by Congress when the government discovered that more than one-third of all Native American children were being adopted out of their tribes and given to white adoptive and foster parents. The government wanted to make sure to preserve the culture and heritage of the tribes, which is why they created the law.

Now, a father is trying to use the ICWA to his advantage as he fights for custody of a child he originally relinquished all parental rights to. The story begins when a woman with the initials C.M. of primarily Hispanic heritage met a partially Cherokee man with the initials D.B. C.M. worked at a nearby casino when she met D.B., a member of the Cherokee nation who is about 2% Native American. The couple got engaged, but during their engagement period things disintegrated between them and D.B. left C.M. devastated. The woman then notified her ex-fiancé that she was pregnant, but he did not seem rattled.

D.B. later texted C.M. saying that he wanted to relinquish all parental rights to the child and that he did not want to support the baby. With no money to cover the expenses on her own, C.M. made the brave decision to put her unborn baby up for adoption. She located a kind couple from South Carolina, and the to-be parents supported C.M. through her last few months of pregnancy and were in the birthing room when she gave birth to her little girl.

About a month before the birth took place, C.M. dutifully notified the Cherokee Nation that she was adopting a child outside of the tribe. This gave the nation a chance to intervene under the Child Welfare Act, but they failed to do so. The Cherokee Nation said that they didn't even have a record of D.B. as a Cherokee member. Yet four months after the open adoption had been arranged, with the child already at her new home, D.B. came back into the picture and demanded full custody of his daughter under ICWA. He said that he was not aware that the child would be adopted out, and assumed that the baby was going to remain with C.M. Now, he claimed that he wanted to raise the child.

A South Carolina court determined that the ICWA trumped the state law, and demanded that the adoptive family give their two-year-old baby girl to a father she had never met. The family decided to appeal, and the case landed in the Supreme Court this week. Now, Supreme Court judges are looking through the implications of the case to determine whether or not the father should be able to keep his child. The Supreme Court plans to look over the case and return a verdict in June. If you are having adoption complications, then you are going to want a local family attorney to assist you. Talk to someone today for assistance!